It was odd. No one dwelt here. No one built here. But the thing that he saw didn’t look natural. He was tempted to go look more closely at it. The longing to go home tugged him in the other direction. But home had waited a long time already, and he was still a vocate to the Graith of Guardians: they would want to know if someone was settling in these slopes, so near to the Wardlands.

He climbed the hill.

The thing at the top was an oblong box made of crystalline stones. Inside the box was a body. He recognized it long before he reached the top of the hill. It was, or had been, Naevros syr Tol.

Naevros lay, as if sleeping, encased in the stone. The sunlight made the crystal glow, reminding Morlock of the armor his avatar had worn when they fought beyond the wide world’s end. The body was dressed with Naevros’ customary elegance, but his cloak was not the red cloak of a vocate. It was the black cloak of an exile, separated from the Wardlands by the First Decree.

Morlock stood there for a long time, gazing on his friend and enemy. He had no words to say, no prayers for the dead. He remembered the murder of Earno and his hands clenched. Then he remembered long hours of talking, laughing, drinking, fencing. He would say no curses either. Naevros was dead and, it seemed, exiled; the thing was done.

He turned to go.

Noreê stood below him on the slope. There was a black cloak in her hands, a red cloak on her shoulders. She looked at him without anger, almost with pity. “He meant something to you—didn’t he?” she asked wistfully.

“Yes.”

“And to me. He isn’t dead, you know. But his spirit is gone.”

Morlock thought back to the burning valley beyond the edge of the world. “He’s dead.”

Noreê looked away. “They put him out here,” she said, “because the body still breathes, once a day or so. They put a black cloak on him because they said. . . . Well, he earned it.”

“And worse.”

“But Bleys is still summoner, and Lernaion. There is no justice, only defense.”

Morlock waited.

“I cast a mantia that told me you might come this way,” Noreê said. “I . . . I used a path-magic to draw you here, too. I wanted to be the one to tell you, and I wanted to tell you here. Now . . . it’s not as I imagined it. But never mind.”

She turned to face Morlock and held out the black cloak toward him. “The Graith sends you this.”

He took it by reflex, looked at it uncomprehendingly. It was cut just like a vocate’s cloak, but it was black, not red. It was the cloak of exile.

He raised his eyes and looked into hers. “They can’t,” he said.

“They did.”

“I have a right to defend myself.”

“You have no rights in the Wardlands. You are an exile. Three vocates died during your duel with Naevros, did you know that? Many were hurt. All were frightened, and frightened people are easy to lead. . . .”

He ran past her down the slope.

“Don’t go back!” she called after him. “I don’t say it as. . . . Don’t go back! Don’t try to go back!”

He ignored her. He ran with long, even strides down the slope until he reached the plain of the Maze. He felt the talic resistance before him, felt with his insight the shifting path that would lead him, by slow gradual steps, toward the other side.

He ignored it and walked straight against the talic wall of the Maze. It was difficult, but there was a fierce satisfaction in taking each step. He was in a mood to fight something; the Maze would do. When he reached the other side they could kill him or treat with him. But he was determined to lay his defense before the Graith. Someone, someone would listen to him.

Alarm bells were ringing in the Gray Tower over the Gap of Lone; he could hear them from afar. He saw Guardians in three colors of cloak standing at the tower’s base. In his fierce battle with the power of the Maze, he didn’t bother to identify any of them. He would see them face-to-face soon enough. He held the black cloak aloft in a gesture of defiance for them all to see.

He was about a thousand paces from the end of the Maze when his left leg suddenly went out from under him. He fell into the dark, golden grass of the plain and didn’t understand what had happened until flame began to smolder around him. Then he realized: someone had shot him.

It must be a gravebolt, to strike from such a distance. It had passed through his left thigh; the wound was deep, but it had not severed the great artery of the leg.

His Ambrosial blood was spreading fire in the dry grass of the plain. The gravebolt, too, was burning. But before it was consumed, he saw the runic rose carved on the shaft.

On a warm autumnal day, Jordel stopped by Aloê’s new house to have breakfast and say, “You don’t have to do this.”

The one irritated her as much as the other, but it was the last day she would endure either one for a while: she was already packed for her journey north. Her ostler had already saddled Raudhfax, in fact.

“That’s a complicated teleological question,” she said.

“I didn’t ask a question.”

“You implied one. Can a mantia be broken?”

“I always try to avoid mantias, myself. Hate causal loops.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Jordel finished the rolls and tea that Aloê had made for her breakfast and said, “There! Ready to start?”

“I suppose so. Are you coming along?”

“Of course! Unless you’d rather I didn’t. Baran’s coming, too, although he discreetly waited outside.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was hungry.”

Aloê looked at her friend narrowly. “I thought you wouldn’t want to be seen with me, J?”

He made a disgusted face. “That kind of stupid, sloppy thinking is precisely why I came! You are my friend. You are my peer in the Graith of Guardians. You stood by me in some rough times. I stand by you.”

“Even though you disagree with me?”

“I don’t know that I do disagree with you. I simply say you need not do this.”

“Ever had a horse that was dying, J?”

“Yes. And, if you want to know, I always pay a professional horse-knacker to put them out of their misery for me. It’s a trivial comfort, but it helps me sleep better.”

“This’ll help me sleep better.”

“I’m not arguing with you, am I?”

“You are, in fact, arguing with me.”

“Well. You started it!”

She kissed his forehead, in preference to kicking him, and walked ahead of him out the door, where Raudhfax was awaiting her, along with Baran and the brothers’ two horses. Jordel’s was an ungainly, sway-backed, yellow nag that began to dance with joy as soon as he saw Jordel approaching; Baran’s was a stalwart brown stallion with an ill-tempered eye, a bit like Baran himself.

“Thanks!” she said to her ostler. “Take care of the house for me, won’t you? I won’t be more than a halfmonth or so.”

“Take your time,” said the ostler, and turned away as they rode off.

They did not, in fact, waste much time on their trip north. It wasn’t a pleasure excursion.

They found Bleys already in residence at the Gray Tower. He greeted them in the atrium with an unpleasantly warm smile.

“I wondered if you would really go through with it, my dear,” he said.

“Call me that again and I’ll cut your throat. I’ll do it personally, too—not through an assassin.”

His smile disappeared, reappeared. He turned away.

“Does everyone in the Graith know about that damned mantia?” she muttered to Jordel and Baran.

Jordel hah-hummed for a bit, and Baran finally said, “Yes. You should not have consulted Noreê. It’s the type of story that would amuse her.”

Noreê was also the greatest seer Aloê knew, apart from the unspeakable Bleys. Perhaps she should have consulted Illion, but he was undergoing the rigors of ascent to the rank of summoner—the one good thing to come out of the Graith recently, she thought.